Vice President Kamala Harris will be taking the lead in trying to fix the growing migrant crisis at the U.S. southern border. The U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency says in February there were 100,000 people who came to the border, and the Biden administration says border crossing could be the highest in 20 years if it keeps at that pace. The Vice President will be working with Central American countries, which is where a lot of the migrants are coming from, to reduce that number. But Senator Rob Portman says there could be another way. He is working on getting support for creating a system that would process asylum cases at the border immediately. This idea has been tested for a few years but was never made permanent.
“Instead of getting into a processing facility by the border patrol and then on by HHS (Health and Human Services) and then released into the United States and then waiting four to five years for your court case to come up, in the meantime, a lot of folks don’t show up. Instead, have people stay at the border and have the adjudication be rapid,” says Sen. Portman. (R) Ohio. “So, you have an asylum officer see the person immediately, you have due process, but you know yes or no. But only 15% of these claims are being accepted at the end of the day and if people knew that, I think they would be less likely to come to the border.”
Portman says it would also make sense that these children that are traveling to the United States be processed in their home countries rather than waiting till they get to the southern border.
